How is your Gross Ethical Product going?
Governments will soon start predicting and analyzing (relentlessly also as usual) GDPs as the tool for measurement of something, normally how well a given country has performed economically.
If GDP lowered, perception is that something (generally wealth) has been lost. That could not be farthest from reality, unless you consider wealth under mid-20th century standards. Behind a big GDP growth a big destruction of true wealth could be just under your sight.
My home country, Brazil, will surely go down in GDP expectations. Others shall move up in the list. I know exactly the script: will see many shared posts in social media with people upset about it. I think it will not be worthy to be upset, unless you regard 100-year old theories such as economies of scale and surplus as you guiding principles of humankind good-standing.
The history of cascading of wealth down to less well-to-do situations in 2021 sounds like a speech about the wonders of single-use plastic bottles — it has its benefits and usage, but long term problems may counterbalance them.
I keep challenging the worn-out cliché that #corruption could be a cultural trait — sleeping in hammocks or using chopsticks is cultural, because if you offer an user an alternative like a bed or a set of silverware, they may well decline. I am supported by concrete and tested research that most of people deciding to engage in fraud or bribery would likely agree in doing something else if their inner-selves formed by all the influences, pressures and specially incentives, could trigger a distinctive mindset.
These success measurement rulers such as the GDP-obsession are becoming clearly obsolete when it comes to tackle true society and ecology regeneration — I now complete over 25 years of legal and corporate investigation practices and luckily never met anyone (in person) who would vocally oppose to ethical behavior.
Just as world peace, it seems like an ubiquitous feeling.
When it comes to tackling these ethical issues, nothing is more misleading that looking at GDP (or corporate revenues for that matter) as a sign of anything going truly good. Both have profound limitations.
War for instance is a highly-successful GDP-growth story. Cheap labor in construction, pesticides use in agribusiness, as well. However one shall still have a hard time to elaborate that either options provide good for the environment and human well-being. I cannot think of more deeply rooted ethical concern than these two topics.
Last year I got stroke by the article at The Economist portraying Mr. James Lovelock, author of the “Gaia hypothesis” and one of my favorite living minds. I went however into a glooming perspective, when Mr. Lovelocks mentions that: “Cyborgs will have an incentive to conserve humans rather than wipe them out, since they will need life-forms to help cool the planet for their own survival — though mortals may be relegated to the status of pets and play-things.”.
Purely out of the clear incapacity of our species to address such basic standards and excellent non-polemic elevator subject: ethics.
Value is everything that is true, dear and praised while profit is a fiction created upon a mutual contract.
It strikes me how could we possibly still be focused in counting “product” instead of “conduct”, as if the latter was not even more meaningful. It is not conduct as only ethical behavior. It is about nurturing rightful speech, choices, thoughts and emotions. When we let our best interests to resume in a product (including people that become a product for themselves by self praise looking at the mirror every morning)
Or, being Mr. Lovelock correct, we will just hope the cyborg that eventually will conserve our great-grand-children to have mercy on them.
